A leading climate forecaster says the economic cost of Hurricane Irma will come in at around $100 billion US, bringing the combined economic toll for Irma and her predecessor Harvey to almost $300 billion US.
After battering the state on Sunday as category 4 hurricane and working its way north, the storm has now passed through much of Florida and on to the panhandle and Georgia, where it is expected to bring dangerous wind and flooding to areas as far north as Kentucky and West Virginia, even though its intensity is predicted to be downgraded to a tropical depression on Tuesday.
Preliminary estimates of the storm’s damage are only starting to come in, and it’s already clear the economic toll will be significant. More than 4 million Floridians are without power, and much of the state’s infrastructure will need repairing or replacing.
Florida Power and Light, the state’s main utility, says the storm will require an “extensive rebuild” of the electrical grid. “Our west coast customers will likely be without power for a much longer period of time,” CEO Eric Silagy said.
Construction activity like that would likely add to GDP over the long run, but costs a lot in the short term.
“We believe the damage estimate from Irma to be about $100 billion, among the costliest hurricanes of all time,” said Joel N. Myers, president of forecasting firm AccuWeather.
That comes on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which brought even more damage to parts of Texas, giving the U.S. economy a double-shot that could be large enough to show up in national numbers. 2017’s hurricane season marks the first time since record-keeping began that two Category 4 storms have made U.S. landfall in the same year, AccuWeather said.
“We estimated that Hurricane Harvey is to be the costliest weather disaster in U.S. history at $190 billion or one full percentage point of the GDP. Together, AccuWeather predicts these two disasters amount to 1.5 of a percentage point of the GDP, which will about equal and therefore counter the natural growth of the economy for the period of mid-August through the end of the fourth quarter,” Myers said.